Half of those surveyed said that they did not have a plan in place to deal with disasters or data loss; 41% said it did not occur to them to put together a plan; 40% said that disaster preparedness was not a priority.
Less than half of respondents said their companies backed up their data weekly and only 23% backed up their data daily. In addition, 44% said that they would lose at least 40% of their data in the event of disaster.
“According to the research findings, SMBs still haven’t recognized the tremendous impact a disaster can have on their businesses. Despite warnings, it seems like many still think it can’t happen to them,” said Bernard Laroche, senior director of SMB product marketing at Symantec.
Symantec commissioned Applied Research to conduct the survey of 1840 IT professionals working at SMBs in 23 countries.
Half of the SMBs that have implemented disaster preparedness plans developed them only after experiencing an outage and/or data loss. Only 28% have actually tested their recovery plans. The survey found that 36% of SMBs intended to create a disaster preparedness plan in the future.
The median cost of downtime for an SMB is $12,500 per day, according to the survey. Outages cause customers to leave – 54% of SMB customer respondents reported they had switched SMB vendors due to unreliable computing systems, a 12% increase compared with last year’s survey. This downtime could also put them out of business.
When SMBs experience downtime, it costs their customers an average of $10,000 per day, according to the survey. In addition to direct financial costs, 29% of customers surveyed lost “some” or “a lot” of important data as a result of disasters impacting their SMB vendors.
Symantec recommended that SMBs formulate a disaster preparedness plan that includes identification of key IT systems and data that is intrinsic to running the business, back up data frequently, train employees on data security and recovery, and test and review the disaster plan frequently.